About the book: 2000 / The outstanding Russian artist Vasily Dmitrievich Polenov is a somewhat mysterious figure in Russian art. He entered the history of art with his quiet, but very strong and heartfelt words as a “poet in painting,” who revealed the intimate world of an ancient Russian estate, the secret of the attractive beauty of the national landscape and the “colorful grandeur” of the East. “This extraordinary Russian man,” Fyodor Chaliapin wrote about Polenov, “somehow managed to distribute himself between the Russian lake with a lily and the harsh hills of Jerusalem, the hot sands of the Asian desert. His biblical scenes, his high priests, his Christ - how could he combine in his soul this sharp and colorful grandeur with the silence of a simple Russian lake with crucian carp? Isn’t that why, however, the spirit of the deity blows over its quiet lakes??»